This is the story of how the American
Republic developed from colonial beginnings in the 16th century,
when the first European explorers arrived, until modern times.

"We, the people
of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union,
establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the
common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the
blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and
establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

As the nation
developed, it expanded westward from small settlements along the
Atlantic Coast, eventually including all the territory between the
Atlantic and Pacific oceans across the middle of the North American
continent, as well as two noncontiguous states and a number of
territories. At the same time, the population and the economy of the
United States grew and changed dramatically. The population
diversified as immigrants arrived from all countries of the world.
From its beginnings as a remote English colony, the United States
has developed the largest economy in the world. Throughout its
history, the United States has faced struggles, both within the
country—between various ethnic, religious, political, and economic
groups—and with other nations. The efforts to deal with and resolve
these struggles have shaped the United States of America into the
late 20th century.

EARLY CULTURAL
INTERACTION
Early American history began in the collision of European, West
African, and Native American peoples in North America. Europeans
"discovered" America by accident, then created empires out of the
conquest of indigenous peoples and the enslavement of Africans. Yet
conquest and enslavement were accompanied by centuries of cultural
interaction—interaction that spelled disaster for Africans and
Native Americans and triumph for Europeans, to be sure, but
interaction that transformed all three peoples in the process.

Native America in
1580
The lands and human societies that European explorers called a New
World were in fact very old. During the Ice Ages much of the world’s
water was bound up in glaciers. Sea level dropped by hundreds of
feet, creating a land bridge between Alaska and Siberia. Asians
walked across to become the first human inhabitants of the Americas.
Scientists disagree on when this happened, but most estimates say it
was around 30,000 years ago. When the last glaciers receded about
10,000 years ago (thus ending this first great migration to
America), ancestors of the Native Americans filled nearly all of the
habitable parts of North and South America. They lived in isolation
from the history—and particularly from the diseases—of what became
known as the Old World.

The Native Americans who greeted the first Europeans had become
diverse peoples. They spoke between 300 and 350 distinct languages,
and their societies and ways of living varied tremendously. The
Aztecs of Mexico and the Incas of Peru built great empires (see
Aztec Empire; Inca Empire). In what is now the United States, the
Mississippians (see Mound Builders) built cities surrounded
by farmland between present–day St. Louis, Missouri, (where their
city of Cahokia was larger than medieval London) and Natchez,
Mississippi. The Mississippians’ "Great Sun" king ruled
authoritatively and was carried from place to place by servants,
preceded by flute–players. The Pueblo peoples of the Southwest lived
in large towns, irrigated their dry land with river water, and
traded with peoples as far away as Mexico and California.

In the East, the peoples who eventually encountered English settlers
were varied, but they lived in similar ways. All of them grew much
of their food. Women farmed and gathered food in the woods. Men
hunted, fished, and made war. None of these peoples kept herds of
domestic animals; they relied on abundant wild game for protein. All
lived in family groups, but owed their principal loyalties to a
wider network of kin and to their clans. Some—the Iroquois in
upstate New York and the Powhatan confederacy in Virginia—formed
alliances called confederacies for the purposes of keeping peace
among neighbors and making war on outsiders. Even within these
confederacies, however, everyday political organization seldom
extended beyond villages, and village chiefs ruled their
independent–minded people by consent.

West Africa in 1580

In Central and West
Africa, the great inland kingdoms of Mali and Ghana were influenced
(and largely converted) by Islam, and these kingdoms had traded with
the Muslim world for hundreds of years. From the beginning, slaves
were among the articles of trade. These earliest enslaved Africans
were criminals, war captives, and people sold by their relatives to
settle debts. New World demand increased the slave trade and changed
it. Some of the coastal kingdoms of present–day Togo and Benin
entered the trade as middlemen. They conducted raids into the
interior and sold their captives to European slavers. Nearly all of
the Africans enslaved and brought to America by this trade were
natives of the western coastal rain forests and the inland forests
of the Congo and Central Africa.

About half of all Africans who were captured, enslaved, and sent to
the Americas were Bantu–speaking peoples. Others were from smaller
ethnic and language groups. Most had been farmers in their homeland.
The men hunted, fished, and tended animals, while women and men
worked the fields cooperatively and in large groups. They lived in
kin–based villages that were parts of small kingdoms. They practiced
polygyny (men often had several wives, each of whom maintained a
separate household), and their societies tended to give very
specific spiritual duties to women and men. Adolescent girls and
boys were inducted into secret societies in which they learned the
sacred and separate duties of women and men. These secret societies
provided supernatural help from the spirits that governed tasks such
as hunting, farming, fertility, and childbirth. Although formal
political leaders were all men, older, privileged women exercised
great power over other women. Thus enslaved African peoples in the
New World came from societies in which women raised children and
governed each other, and where men and women were more nearly equal
than in America or Europe.

European Exploration

In the century before
Columbus sailed to America, Western Europeans were unlikely
candidates for worldwide exploration. The Chinese possessed the
wealth and the seafaring skills that would have enabled them to
explore, but they had little interest in the world outside of China.
The Arabs and other Islamic peoples also possessed wealth and
skills. But they expanded into territories that were next to
them—and not across uncharted oceans. The Ottoman Turks captured
Constantinople in 1453 and by the 1520s had nearly reached Vienna.
These conquests gave them control over the overland trade routes to
Asia as well as the sea route through the Persian Gulf. The
conquests also gave them an expanding empire to occupy their
attention.

Western Europeans, on the other hand, were developing the necessary
wealth and technology and a compelling need to explore. A group of
new monarchs were making nation-states in Britain and in continental
Europe—states with unprecedentedly large treasuries and military
establishments. The population of Western European nations was
growing, providing a tax base and a labor force for new classes of
large landholders. These "elites" provided markets for goods that
were available only through trade with Asia. When the expansion of
Islam gave control of eastern trade routes to Islamic middlemen,
Western Europeans had strong incentives to find other ways to get to
Asia.

They were also
developing sailing technology and knowledge of currents and winds to
travel long distances on the open sea. The Portuguese led the way.
They copied and improved upon the designs of Arab sailing ships and
learned to mount cannons on those ships. In the 15th century they
began exploring the west coast of Africa—bypassing Arab merchants to
trade directly for African gold and slaves. They also colonized the
Madeira Islands, the Azores, and the Cape Verde Islands and turned
them into the first European slave plantations.

The European explorers were all looking for an ocean route to Asia.
Christopher Columbus sailed for the monarchs of Spain in 1492. He
used the familiar prevailing winds to the Canary Islands, off the
northwest coast of Africa, and then sailed on. In about two months
he landed in the Caribbean on an island in the Bahamas, thinking he
had reached the East Indies. Columbus made three more voyages. He
died in 1506, still believing that he had discovered a water route
to Asia.

The Spanish investigated further. Italian navigator Amerigo Vespucci
sailed to the northern coast of South America in 1499 and pronounced
the land a new continent. European mapmakers named it America in his
honor. Spanish explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus of
Panama and in 1513 became the first of the European explorers of
America to see the Pacific Ocean. That same year another Spaniard,
Juan Ponce de León, explored the Bahamas and Florida in search of
the fountain of youth.

The first European
voyages to the northern coast of America were old and forgotten: The
Norsemen (Scandinavian Vikings) sailed from Greenland and stayed in
Newfoundland for a time around 1000. Some scholars argue that
European fishermen had discovered the fishing waters off eastern
Canada by 1480. But the first recorded voyage was made by English
navigator John Cabot, who sailed from England to Newfoundland in
1497. Giovanni da Verrazzano, in 1524, and Jacques Cartier, in 1534,
explored nearly the whole Atlantic coast of the present United
States for France. By that time, Europeans had scouted the American
coast from Newfoundland to Brazil. While they continued to look for
shortcuts to Asia, Europeans began to think of America for its own
sake. Spain again led the way: Hernán Cortés invaded Mexico in 1519,
and Francisco Pizarro did the same in Peru in 1532—nearly a full
century before English or French colonization began.

Cultural Interaction:
The Columbian Exchange

What was to become
American history began in a biological and cultural collision of
Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans. Europeans initiated this
contact and often dictated its terms. For Native Americans and
Africans, American history began in disaster.

Native Americans
suffered heavily because of their isolation from the rest of the
world. Europe, Africa, and Asia had been trading knowledge and
technologies for centuries. Societies on all three continents had
learned to use iron and kept herds of domestic animals. Europeans
had acquired gunpowder, paper, and navigational equipment from the
Chinese. Native Americans, on the other hand, had none of these.
They were often helpless against European conquerors with horses,
firearms, and—especially—armor and weapons.

The most disastrous consequence of the long-term isolation of the
Americas was biological. Asians, Africans, and Europeans had been
exposed to one another’s diseases for millennia; by 1500 they had
developed an Old World immune system that partially protected them
from most diseases. On average, Native Americans were bigger and
healthier than the Europeans who first encountered them. But they
were helpless against European and African diseases. Smallpox was
the biggest killer, but illnesses such as measles and influenza also
killed millions of people. The indigenous population of Mexico, for
example, was more than 17 million when Cortés landed in 1519. By
1630 it had dropped to 750,000, largely as a result of disease.
Scholars estimate that on average the population of a Native
American people dropped 90 percent in the first century of contact.
The worst wave of epidemics in human history cleared the way for
European conquest.

Europeans used the
new lands as sources of precious metals and plantation agriculture.
Both were complex operations that required labor in large, closely
supervised groups. Attempts to enslave indigenous peoples failed,
and attempts to force them into other forms of bound labor were
slightly more successful but also failed because workers died of
disease. Europeans turned to the African slave trade as a source of
labor for the Americas. During the colonial periods of North and
South America and the Caribbean, far more Africans than Europeans
came to the New World. The slave trade brought wealth to some
Europeans and some Africans, but the growth of the slave trade
disrupted African political systems, turned slave raiding into
full–scale war, and robbed many African societies of their young
men. The European success story in the Americas was achieved at
horrendous expense for the millions of Native Americans who died and
for the millions of Africans who were enslaved.

COLONIAL EXPERIMENTS

Beginning in 1519, Spain, Portugal, France, The Netherlands, and
England established colonies in the Americas. Spain made a great
mining and agricultural empire in Mexico, South America, and the
Caribbean. Portugal created a slave-based agricultural colony in
Brazil. In North America the French and Dutch established
rudimentary European societies and—more importantly—elaborate,
long-term trading networks with the indigenous peoples. Among the
European invaders of North America, only the English established
colonies of agricultural settlers, whose interests in Native
Americans was less about trade than about the acquisition of land.
That fact would have huge implications in the long struggle for
control of North America.

New Spain
Spain was the first European nation to colonize America. Cortés
invaded Mexico and (with the help of smallpox and other Native
Americans) defeated the Aztec Empire between 1519 and 1521. By 1533
Pizarro had conquered the Incas of Peru. Both civilizations
possessed artifacts made of precious metals, and the Spanish
searched for rumored piles of gold and silver. They sent expeditions
under Hernando de Soto, Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, and Álvar
Núñez Cabeza de Vaca as far north as what is now Kansas and
Colorado. They were looking for cities made of gold and did not find
them. But in 1545 they did discover silver at Potosí, in what is now
Bolivia, and in Mexico around the same time. New World gold and
silver mines were the base of Spanish wealth and power for the next
hundred years.

Shortly after the conquests, Catholic missionaries—Jesuits until
1571, Franciscans and Dominicans after that—attempted to convert
Native Americans to Christianity. They established missions not only
at the centers of the new empire, but also in New Mexico and
Florida. Spanish Jesuits even built a short–lived mission outpost in
Virginia.

After defeating
indigenous peoples, Spanish conquerors established a system of
forced labor called encomienda. However, Spanish governmental
and religious officials disliked the brutality of this system. As
time passed, Spanish settlers claimed land rather than labor,
establishing large estates called haciendas. By the time
French, Dutch, Swedish, and English colonists began arriving in the
New World in the early 17th century, the Spanish colonies in New
Spain (Mexico), New Granada (Colombia), and the Caribbean were
nearly 100 years old. The colonies were a source of power for Spain,
and a source of jealousy from other European nations.

New France
By the 1530s French explorers had scouted the coast of America from
Newfoundland to the Carolinas. Samuel de Champlain built the
foundations of what would become French Canada (New France). From
1604 to 1606 he established a settlement at Acadia in Nova Scotia,
and in 1608 he traveled up the Saint Lawrence River, made contact
with the Huron and Algonquin peoples, and established a French
settlement at Québec.

From the beginning, New France concentrated on two activities: fur
trade and Catholic missions. Missionaries and traders were often at
odds, but both knew that the success of New France depended upon
friendly relations with the native peoples. While Jesuits converted
thousands of Native Americans, French traders roamed the forests.
Both were among the first white explorers of the interior of North
America, and France’s ties with Native Americans would have
important implications for the next 150 years. By 1700 the French
population of New France was 14,000. French Canada was a
strategically crucial brake on English settlement. But the much
smaller sugar islands in the Caribbean—Saint-Domingue (Haiti),
Guadeloupe, and Martinique—were economically far more valuable to
France.

Dutch Settlements
Another contender for influence in North America was the Dutch,
inhabitants of the leading commercial nation in the early 17th
century. Sailing for the Dutch in 1609, Henry Hudson explored the
river that now bears his name. The Dutch established a string of
agricultural settlements between New Amsterdam (New York City) and
Fort Orange (Albany, New York) after 1614. They became the chief
European traders with the Iroquois, supplying them with firearms,
blankets, metal tools, and other European trade goods in exchange
for furs. The Iroquois used those goods to nearly destroy the Huron
and to push the Algonquins into Illinois and Michigan. As a result,
the Iroquois gained control of the Native American side of the fur
trade.

The Dutch
settlements, known as New Netherland, grew slowly at first and
became more urban as trade with the indigenous peoples outdistanced
agriculture as a source of income. The colony was prosperous and
tolerated different religions. As a result, it attracted a steady
and diverse stream of European immigrants. In the 1640s the 450
inhabitants of New Amsterdam spoke 18 different languages. The
colony had grown to a European population of 6,000 (double that of
New France) on the eve of its takeover by England in 1664.

First English
Settlements

The Spanish, French,
and Dutch wanted to find precious metals in the Americas, to trade
with the indigenous peoples, and to convert them to Christianity.
Their agricultural colonies in the Caribbean, Mexico, and South
America were worked by African slaves and by unwilling native
peoples, and relatively few Europeans settled permanently in those
places. In contrast, England, a latecomer to New World colonization,
sent more people to the Americas than other European nations—about
400,000 in the 17th century—and established more permanent
agricultural colonies.

English migrants came to America for two main reasons. The first
reason was tied to the English Reformation. King Henry VIII broke
with the Catholic Church in the 1530s. Through a series of political
and religious twists and turns, the new Church of England developed
a Protestant theology, but it retained much of Catholic liturgy and
ritual forms. Within the Church of England, radical Protestants,
later called Puritans, wanted to suppress the remaining Catholic
forms. The fortunes of the Puritans depended on the religious
preferences of English monarchs. Queen Mary I, who ruled from 1553
to 1558, was a committed Catholic who tried to roll back the tide of
religious change; she executed hundreds of Protestants and chased
many more into exile. Her successor, Elizabeth I, invited the exiles
back and tried to resolve differences within the English church. The
Stuart kings who followed her, James I and Charles I, again
persecuted Puritans. As a result, Puritans became willing to
immigrate to America.

The second reason for
English colonization was that land in England had become scarce. The
population of England doubled from 1530 to 1680. In the same years,
many of England’s largest landholders evicted tenants from their
lands, fenced the lands, and raised sheep for the expanding wool
trade. The result was a growing number of young, poor,
underemployed, and often desperate English men and women. It was
from their ranks that colonizers recruited most of the English
population of the mainland colonies.

GROWTH OF THE ENGLISH
COLONIES

Permanent English settlement began in the Chesapeake Bay area in
1607 and in Massachusetts in 1620. The histories of the two regions
during their first century and a half are almost opposite. Virginia
began as a misguided business venture and as a disorderly society of
young men. Massachusetts settlers were Puritans. They arrived as
whole families and sometimes as whole congregations, and they lived
by laws derived from the Old Testament. Over time, however, Virginia
was transformed into a slave-based tobacco colony where slaves were
carefully disciplined, where most white families owned land, and
where a wealthy and stable planter-slaveholder class provided much
of the leadership of revolutionary and early national America. New
England, on the other hand, evolved into a more secularized and
increasingly overpopulated society based on family farms and
inherited land—land that was becoming scarce to the point that
increasing numbers of whites were slipping into poverty.

The Chesapeake,
Virginia

Jamestown, the first
permanent English settlement in America, began as a business venture
that failed. The Virginia Company of London, a joint stock company
organized much like a modern corporation, sent 104 colonists to
Chesapeake Bay in 1607. The company wanted to repeat the successes
of the Spanish: The colonists were to look for gold and silver, for
a passage to Asia, and for other discoveries that would quickly
reward investors. If the work was heavy, the colonists were to force
indigenous peoples to help them. The composition of the group sent
to Jamestown reflected the company’s expectations for life in the
colony. Colonists included silversmiths, goldsmiths, even a
perfumer, and far too many gentlemen who were unprepared for rugged
colonial life.

The colonists found a defensible spot on low ground and named it
Jamestown. None of their plans worked out, and the settlers began to
die of dysentery and typhoid fever. At the end of the first year,
only about one-third remained alive. The Native Americans were
troublesome, too. Organized into the large and powerful Powhatan
confederacy, they grew tired of demands for food and launched a war
against the settlers that continued intermittently from 1609 to
1614.

In 1619 the Virginia Company reorganized. The colony gave up the
search for quick profits and turned to growing tobacco. Under the
new plan, colonists received 50 acres from the company for paying a
person’s passage to Virginia. The new settlers were indentured
servants who agreed to work off the price of their passage. Thus
settlers who could afford it received land and labor at the same
time. In 1624 King James I of England made Virginia the first royal
colony. He revoked the Virginia Company’s charter and appointed a
royal governor and council, and established a House of Burgesses
elected by the settlers. Despite fights with the Powhatan
confederacy (about 350 settlers died in one attack in 1622), the
Virginia colony began to prosper. It had found a cash crop, a source
of labor, and a stable government.

Maryland
In 1634 Cecilius Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore, founded Maryland
under a royal charter, which made the colony Baltimore’s personal
property. Baltimore, a Catholic nobleman, hoped to establish a
refuge for English Catholics and sell large estates to individuals
who would operate as feudal lords.

Neither the plans for
feudalism nor for a Catholic refuge worked out, however. More
Protestants than Catholics immigrated to Maryland. In 1649 Baltimore
granted religious toleration to all Christians, but Protestants did
not stop opposing him. They even overthrew Baltimore’s government on
several occasions. Baltimore’s dreams of feudalism failed as well.
Freed servants preferred farming on their own to staying on as
tenants, and the colony quickly evolved as Virginia had: Planters
(many of them former servants) imported servants from England and
grew tobacco.

Mortality Rate

Chesapeake tobacco
growers needed able–bodied servants. Most of those imported to
Virginia and Maryland were young, poor, single men. Disease, bad
water, and hostile native peoples produced a horrific death rate. In
1618 there were 700 English settlers in Virginia. The reorganized
Virginia Company sent 3,000 more before 1622. A headcount that year
found only about 1,200 still alive. Still, surviving planters
continued to import servants. Some servants lived long enough to end
their indentures, but many others died. In addition, there were too
few women in the Chesapeake to enable surviving men to build
families and produce new Virginians. More than two-thirds of men
never married, and the white population of Virginia did not begin to
sustain itself until at least the 1680s. Before that, the colony
survived only by importing new people to replace those who died.

Introduction of
Slavery

White servants worked Chesapeake tobacco farms until the late 17th
century. But earlier in the century, English tobacco and sugar
planters in the Caribbean had adopted African slavery, long the
chief labor system in Portuguese and Spanish sugar colonies in the
Caribbean. By 1700 the English islands were characterized by large
plantations and by populations that were overwhelmingly African.
These African slaves were victims of a particularly brutal and
unhealthy plantation system that killed most of them. It was not a
coincidence that these islands produced more wealth for England than
its other colonies. See also Slavery in the United States:Introduction
of Slavery

Before the 1680s,
Chesapeake planters purchased few African slaves, and the status of
Africans in Virginia and Maryland was unclear. Some were slaves,
some were servants, some were free, and no legal code defined their
standing. The reasons for the slow growth of slavery in the
Chesapeake were not moral, but economic. First, slave traders
received high prices for slaves in the Caribbean—higher than
Virginians could afford, particularly when these expensive laborers
were likely to die. White indentured servants cost less, and
planters lost little when they died. But Chesapeake colonists—both
English and African—grew healthier as they became "seasoned" on
their new continent. At the same time, the English economic crisis
that had supplied servants to the colonies diminished. These changes
made African slaves a better long–term investment: The initial cost
was higher, but the slaves lived and reproduced.

Beginning around
1675, Virginia and Maryland began importing large numbers of African
slaves. By 1690 black slaves outnumbered white servants in those
colonies. Virginia now gave white servants who survived their
indentures 50 acres of land, thus making them a part of the white
landholding class. At the same time, the House of Burgesses drew up
legal codes that assumed a lifetime of bondage for blacks. In the
early 18th century, the Chesapeake emerged as a society of planters
and small farmers who grew tobacco with the labor of African slaves.
There had been slaves in Virginia since 1619. But it was not until
nearly 100 years later that Virginia became a slave society.

The Beginnings of New
England
New England began as a refuge for religious radicals. The first
English settlers were the Pilgrims. They were
Separatists—Protestants who, unlike the Puritans—seceded from the
Church of England rather than try to reform it. They sailed for the
New World in 1620. After difficult early years, they established a
community of farms at Plymouth that was ultimately absorbed by the
Massachusetts Bay Company.

Religion in the New
England Colonies
A much larger Puritan migration began in 1630. The Puritans objected
to the corruption and extravagance of the Stuart kings, who
considered alliances with Catholic monarchs and paid no attention to
Puritan demands for religious reform. The Puritans came to believe
that God would destroy England for these sins. They obtained a
charter from the Massachusetts Bay Company and made plans to
emigrate—not to hide in the wilderness from God’s wrath, but to
preserve Protestant beliefs and to act as a beacon of truth for the
world. A thousand Puritans migrated to Massachusetts in 1630. But
this Great Migration ended in 1642, when the Puritans became
involved in a civil war against the Stuart kings. The Puritans
eventually won and ruled England until 1660. When the migration
ended, Massachusetts had 13,000 European inhabitants.

The Puritans left England because of religious persecution, but
they, too, were intolerant. In Massachusetts they established laws
derived from the Bible, and they punished or expelled those who did
not share their beliefs. The Puritans established a governor and a
general court (an assembly elected by adult male church members) and
governed themselves. Although they refused to secede from the Church
of England, they did away with bishops and church hierarchy and
invented congregationalism. In this type of Protestantism, each
congregation selected its own minister and governed its own
religious life (though outside authority sometimes intervened to
punish heresy).

Government officials
were expected to enforce godly authority, which often meant
punishing religious heresy. Roger Williams was a Separatist who
refused to worship with anyone who—like nearly all Puritans—remained
part of the Church of England. Massachusetts banished him, and he
and a few followers founded Providence in what is now Rhode Island.
Anne Hutchinson was a merchant’s wife and a devout Puritan, but she
claimed that she received messages directly from God and was beyond
earthly authority. This belief was a heresy, a belief
contrary to church teachings, known as Antinomianism. She, too, was
banished and she moved to Rhode Island. Puritan magistrates
continued to enforce religious laws: In the 1650s they persecuted
Quakers, and in the 1690s they executed people accused of
witchcraft.

Growth of New
England’s Population

Once the Puritan
migration to New England stopped in 1642, the region would receive
few immigrants for the next 200 years. Yet the population grew
dramatically—to nearly 120,000 in 1700. Two reasons explain this.
First, in sharp contrast to the unhealthy Chesapeake, Massachusetts
streams provided relatively safe drinking water, and New England’s
cold winters kept dangerous microbes to a minimum. Thus disease and
early death were not the problems that they were farther south.
Second (again in contrast to the Chesapeake) the Puritans migrated
in families, and there were about two women for every three men,
even in the early years. Nearly all colonists married (typically in
their mid–20s for men and early 20s for women), and then produced
children at two-year intervals. With both a higher birthrate and a
longer life expectancy than in England, the Puritan population grew
rapidly almost from the beginning.

The Restoration
Colonies
By 1640 England had founded 6 of the 13 colonies that would become
the original United States. In 1660, after the end of Puritan rule,
Charles II was crowned king of England, an event known as the
Restoration. Charles founded or took over six more colonies: New
York (taken from the Dutch in 1664), New Jersey, Pennsylvania
(including what became Delaware), and North and South Carolina. All
were proprietary colonies—huge land grants to individuals or small
groups who had been loyal to the king during the civil war.

These colonies shared
other similarities as well. None of them was well–funded; they could
ill afford to import colonists from overseas. Thus they tried to
attract settlers from other colonies as much as from the Old World.
These colonies made it easy to own land, and they tended to grant
religious toleration to all Christians. The result (even though
Pennsylvania began as a Quaker colony under the wealthy proprietor
William Penn) was a more ethnically mixed and religiously
pluralistic European population than had come to New England or to
the Chesapeake. These new colonies were populated not only by the
English, but also by the Dutch and eventually by Scots, Scots–Irish,
and Germans. Their populations included Quakers and other religious
dissenters.

Settlers and Native
Americans
The French and Spanish came to the New World to trade with the
indigenous peoples, to convert them to Christianity, and sometimes
to turn them into a labor force for mining and agriculture. In
contrast, the English settlers wanted farmland. Thus they posed a
far greater threat to the Native Americans. Wars were the result. In
New England a Wampanoag chief named Metacomet (the English called
him King Philip) became worried about English intrusion on his land
and ordered attacks on the settlements in 1675. For the next year
Metacomet and his allies destroyed 12 of 90 Puritan towns and
attacked 40 others—capturing or killing one in ten adult male
English settlers. The Puritans counterattacked in the summer of
1676. They killed Metacomet, sold his wife and chief supporters into
slavery in the West Indies, and scattered his coalition. With that,
the power of coastal Native Americans in New England was broken.

In the same years (1675 to 1676) in Virginia, land–hungry settlers
led by a planter named Nathaniel Bacon picked a fight with the
Susquehannock people. The settlers’ goal was simply to end Native
American occupation of lands that whites wanted. When Governor
William Berkeley objected, the rebellious settlers forced the House
of Burgesses to back their war (see Bacon’s Rebellion).
Later, they marched on Jamestown and burned the colonial capital.
Shortly after that, Bacon died of disease, and his rebellion
sputtered out. But a new treaty signed with the Native Americans in
1677 made much of their land available to white settlers.

English and their
Empire
The English had colonies before they had a colonial policy or an
empire. The English government had little interest in directly
governing its colonies. The government was, however, mercantilist:
It wanted colonial economic activity to serve England. The
Navigation Act of 1651 stipulated that imports into British harbors
and colonies could be carried only in British ships or those of the
producing country. A second Navigation Act in 1660 decreed that
colonial trade could be carried only in English ships, and that
crucial commodities such as tobacco and sugar could be sent only to
England or another English colony. Further Navigation Acts in 1663
and 1696 regulated the shipment of goods into the colonies and
strengthened the customs service. For the most part, the Navigation
Acts succeeded in making colonial trade serve England. They also
made the colonists accustomed to and dependent upon imported English
goods. But the acts did not amount to a colonial administration.
Private companies, wealthy proprietors, and the settlers themselves
did what they wanted without official English interference.

King James II tried
to change that. In 1684 he revoked the charter of the Massachusetts
Bay Company. Then in 1686 he created the Dominion of New England
from the colonies of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island,
Plymouth, and Connecticut (all colonies that had been derived from
the original Massachusetts Bay colony), along with New York and New
Jersey. The king sent Sir Edmund Andros to be royal governor of this
huge area. However, the king had problems at home. He was a
Catholic, and he threatened to leave the throne in the hands of his
Catholic son. In 1689 England’s ruling elites deposed James II and
replaced him with his sister Mary and her husband, a militant Dutch
Protestant, William of Orange. As part of the agreement that made
him king, William issued a Bill of Rights that ended absolutist
royal government in England. The ascension of William and Mary is
known in English history as the Glorious Revolution.

American colonists
staged smaller versions of the Glorious Revolution. Massachusetts
and New York revolted against the Dominion of New England. At the
same time, the Protestant majority in Maryland revolted against
Charles Calvert, 3rd Baron Baltimore, and his Catholic elite.
William could have punished all these rebels and re–established the
Dominion of New England. Instead, he reorganized Massachusetts, New
York, and Maryland as royal colonies with elected legislative
assemblies and royally appointed governors. By 1720 William had
transformed all the mainland colonies along these lines except for
Pennsylvania, Maryland (William restored Protestant proprietors in
1716), and Delaware. The Glorious Revolution ended absolutism in
England, and it ensured that government in the mainland colonies
would be both royal and representative.

Colonial Society
The colonies over which the English were beginning to exercise
control were growing rapidly. In 1700 approximately 250,000
Europeans and Africans were living in what would become the United
States. In 1775 there were approximately 2.5 million. Much of the
increase was due to immigration: the forced migration of enslaved
Africans, and the willing migration of English, Scots-Irish, and
Germans.

The middle colonies
were much more diverse than the northern colonies. The English
majority contended with a variety of European settlers, with a large
Native American presence on the western edges, and with a
significant minority of African slaves. In Maryland and Virginia,
the early English settlers had been joined, particularly in the
western counties, by Scots, Scots–Irish, and Germans. In the eastern
counties, African slaves—many of them natives of Africa—often
outnumbered whites.

South Carolina and
Georgia had white populations as diverse as those in the Chesapeake,
and their slave populations were African–born and ethnically
diverse. One historian has noted that a slave would have met more
different kinds of Africans in one day in South Carolina rice fields
than in a lifetime in Africa.

By far the greatest
source of population growth, however, was a phenomenal birth rate
and a relatively low death rate. Americans in the 18th century had
many children, who in turn survived to have children of their own.
American population growth in these years may have been
unprecedented in human history.

The household was the
central institution of colonial society. In Puritan society in
particular families were the cornerstone of godly government. As one
historian put it, Puritans experienced authority as a hierarchy of
strong fathers—beginning with God, descending down through
government officials and ministers, and ending with the fathers of
families. These families were patriarchal: Fathers ruled households,
made family decisions, organized household labor, and were the
representatives of God’s authority within the family. Fathers passed
that authority on to their sons. Puritan magistrates inspected
families to ensure that they were orderly, and it was a capital
crime (at least in the law books) to commit adultery or to strike
one’s father.

Households in other
18th–century colonies may have been less godly, but they were almost
equally dominated by fathers, and most white men had the opportunity
to become patriarchs. Land was relatively abundant, and Americans
seldom practiced primogeniture and entail, which gave oldest sons
their fathers’ full estates and prevented men from dividing their
land. Fathers tended to supply all of their sons with land
(daughters received personal property as a dowry). Thus most
American white men eventually owned their own land and headed their
own households.

As populations grew
and as colonial economies developed, however, that independence
based on property ownership was endangered. Good farmland in the
south came to be dominated by a class of planters, while growing
numbers of poor whites became tenants. The pressure of a growing
population on the supply of farmland made tenancy even more common
in New Jersey and Pennsylvania (research puts the proportion at
about 25 percent by mid-century), while in New England more and more
fathers found themselves unable to provide for their sons. On the
eve of the American Revolution (1775-1783), American white men
prided themselves on a widespread liberty that was based in economic
independence. Meanwhile, the land ownership that upheld that
independence was being undermined.

18th Century Slavery
In the first half of the 18th century, the mainland colonies grew
dramatically but in very different ways. The Chesapeake and the
Carolinas grew plantation staples for world markets—tobacco in the
Chesapeake and North Carolina, rice and indigo in the coastal
regions of South Carolina and Georgia—and they were committed to
African slave labor. Fully 70 percent of South Carolina’s population
was black, nearly all Africans were imported directly to the colony
in the 18th century. The numbers were so huge and the malarial
wetlands they worked on were so unhealthy that masters encouraged
slaves to organize their own labor and to work unsupervised. Because
so many slaves lived and worked relatively unsupervised in this
area, African cultures—language, handicrafts, religious experience
and belief, and more—survived most fully among American slaves in
South Carolina. Rice planters of South Carolina permitted this
cultural independence because it was easier and because the slaves
made them lots of money. South Carolina’s lowland planters were the
wealthiest group in the mainland colonies.

Further north, the tobacco colonies of Virginia and Maryland were
equally committed to slave labor, but slaves led somewhat different
lives here than in the deep South. The African population in these
colonies began to replace itself through reproduction as early as
1720 (compared with 1770 in South Carolina). Still, Chesapeake
planters continued to import new slaves from Africa; about 70,000
went to Virginia in the 18th century and about 25,000 to Maryland.
Slaves in these colonies tended to live and work in smaller, more
closely supervised groups than slaves further south, and their
cultural memory of Africa, though often strong, was less pervasive
than that of Carolina slaves. In addition, white Virginians and
Marylanders were turning to wheat as a secondary crop, a development
that required mills and towns, and thus slave labor in construction,
road building, and some of the skilled crafts.

Northern Agriculture

Around the middle of
the 18th century, a heavily populated and increasingly urbanized
Europe lost the capacity to feed itself, providing an important
market for North American farmers. The middle colonies, particularly
Pennsylvania, became the breadbasket of America. After Pennsylvania
farmers provided for their families from their farms and by trading
with neighbors, they sent their surplus production of corn and
wheat, as much as 40 percent of what they produced, on to the
Atlantic market. New England farmers worked soil that was poor and
rocky, but used the same system.

Economists call this
system safety–first or subsistence–plus agriculture: Farmers
provided for household and neighborhood needs before risking their
surplus in distant and unpredictable markets. In profitable years,
farmers were able to buy finished cloth, dishes and crockery, tea
and coffee, and other goods that colonial trade with England
provided—goods on which more and more Americans depended by 1770.

Religion

British North America
in the 18th century was a religiously and ethnically diverse string
of settlements. New England’s population was overwhelmingly English,
descended from the Great Migration of the 1630s. New England had a
reputation for poor land and intolerance of outsiders, and
immigrants avoided the region. New Englanders continued to practice
congregationalism, though by the 18th century they seldom thought of
themselves as the spearhead of the Reformation. A wave of revivals
known as the Great Awakening swept New England beginning in the
1720s, dividing churchgoers into New Light (evangelical Calvinists)
and Old Light (more moderate) wings. An increasing minority were
calling themselves Baptists.

Nearly all Europeans
in these colonies were Protestants, but individual denominations
were very different. There were Presbyterians, Lutherans, Baptists,
Anglicans, Dutch Reformed, Mennonites and Quakers. While the Church
of England was the established church (the official,
government–supported church) in the Chesapeake colonies, German and
Scottish non-Anglicans were migrating south from the middle
colonies, and Baptists were making their first southern converts.
Although most Chesapeake slaves were American–born by the late 18th
century, they practiced what they remembered of African religions,
while some became Christians in 18th-century revivals.